To see more of Pierre Obendrauf’s photos from the Katy Perry show, click here.

If you’re like me, you leave most shows thinking, “That was OK, but it could have used more cat butt.” The insanity of Katy Perry’s Bell Centre bash could have been limited to the animated clip of impressively toned hind quarters in a feline yoga studio, and the superstar still would have offered an outlandish experience that’s hard to come by in slick Top 40 pop, or anywhere else.

There was so much more. Tuesday’s spectacle – calling it a concert would be like calling Cirque du Soleil a night out at the theatre – took some sharp turns into Cuckoobanana Land without coming off as just a bunch of cartoony randomness. There was no overarching narrative thread to connect all of the eye-scorching set pieces, but the masterful staging and Perry’s sense of serious fun make the Prismatic tour more of a lavishly appointed playground than a series of ADD sketches.

The most superficial level of imagery from last year’s Prism album dominated the opening segment, featuring triangular projections, a triangular ladder for Perry and dancers to cavort upon, and Perry’s emergence from a pyramid-shaped elevation in the stage. That’s not to mention the ingeniously devised stage itself, with an audience pit surrounded by walkways slanting toward a pointed platform, bringing the performers deep into the youthful crowd (speckled with event-appropriate tiaras and neon wigs) and essentially creating six front rows.

Perry’s arrival was accompanied by columns of steam, fauxhawked dancers armed with spears, and the empowerment of Roar. The glow-in-the-dark motif of the headpieces, dress, benign weaponry and, for extra razzle-dazzle, skip ropes carried through the following batch of songs, but new aspects of the stage design kept revealing themselves: the treadmill that brought dancers to a race or crawl along a walkway during Part of Me, the concealed riser that kicked into gear in Wide Awake, the entryways that finally rotated the musicians into view for This Moment. When countless green and red lasers dotted the crowd during the latter number, it felt like a big ending. Perry was just getting started.

The pyramid scheme continued in an Egyptian-themed section. Perry auditioned for Vegas after one of many costume changes, re-emerging in royal regalia astride an animatronic steed for Dark Horse (a characteristically on-the-nose visual interpretation). When she vanished through another trap door only to appear halfway back in the arena, at the tip of the secondary stage, it came close to being a magic trick: Perry’s dancers offered more in the way of colourful interaction than aerobic shock and awe, but this was an expertly choreographed show all the same. Entries and exits were as surreptitious or explosive as required, and set pieces were hidden or disguised until they had to be seen. When acrobats (and, later, Perry) twisted on a giant iron kite suspended above the crowd during the strident E.T., the big moment wasn’t telegraphed.

I Kissed a Girl – the song that “put me on the map,” as Perry proclaimed – climaxed with comically well-endowed mummies swarming the singer, and a pair of guitarists hoisted on harnesses and spraying pyro. This wasn’t the only point in the first half of the two-hour-plus set that the surreal stagings and squintillion-dollar production values threatened to dwarf Perry’s outsized personality. But that wasn’t a problem when the show briefly transformed into a musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s perverse fantasies. After a bugnuts video of cats frolicking through the streets of Kittywood (home of that yoga studio), a bunch of melodious yowls cued “Kitty Purry” – tail immaculately groomed – to show up on a giant ball of yarn, surrounded by similarly clad dancers, for a confusingly arousing cabaret rendition of Hot n Cold. It was true to her well-documented feline fetish and, as much as any other segment, true to her wide-eyed glee.

International Smile confirmed just how committed Perry is to the whole cat thing, with dancers crammed into sardine-tin and goldfish-bowl costumes and the singer getting doused from a vat of milk. By all rights, the subsequent acoustic section should have been a comedown, but it was refreshingly human. An earlier prediction that “this might be the best show of the whole tour” carried a whiff of a script, but here Perry’s affection sounded genuine in an endearing ramble about spending as much time in the city as possible. Dressed in a sparkling shawl – understated by the evening’s standards – she posed for selfies, spotted a familiar face from an encounter on her day off, chatted about gardening, invited a young fan on stage for pizza, and offered a bare-bones, undeniably emotional By the Grace of God to the diehards whose support was a lifeline in turbulent times, “when it wasn’t all bubblegum and rainbow hair.” This was Perry bringing a potentially aloof (albeit dazzling) performance down to the most intimate level possible in a room packed with 16,000 admirers.

It says something about the scope of the show that the club-thumping Walking on Air – with Perry gliding on a harness over a sky-blue tarp – wasn’t a showstopper, but simply a return to what passed for normal on this night. This Is How We Do upped the cartoon quotient, with the performers cruising in a makeshift car – exploiting the walkways for the maximum amount of face time with the audience, as always – while inflatables were paraded through the venue to make Tuesday night feel like Saturday night: a taco, a Champagne bottle, a luxe handbag, a … happy pile of dog poop, maybe? … and a tacky tie-in with Perry’s CoverGirl endorsement.

The stakes were raised for the real climax, as a fan was given the belated gift of a G-rated lap dance and a trip on a rotating throne during the disco-ready Birthday, after which Perry rode a raft of balloons to the far reaches of the arena amid supercharged blasts of confetti. After that celebration, the only place left to go was higher, with Perry owning the stage alone for Firework and its literal-minded but wondrous barrage of sparks and flames.

How was her voice? Highly professional, not that anything more was needed. This level of sensory overload all but precludes criticism of the actual music, and carping about Perry playing up bells, whistles, trapezes and cat outfits at the expense of her songs would be missing the point. It all worked in tandem. And as pure spectacle, with that humble acoustic segment as an appreciated bonus, this was pure magic.

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